Founding Operations Manager

Background

Emerge Career is a gov-tech company designing hybrid job training programs for justice-involved individuals. In addition to the training, our program includes several wrap-around services, such as individualized customer support, data analytics, and a job placement platform.

In less than a year of existence, Emerge Career has been added to the eligible training provider list (ETPL) for Connecticut, New York, Philadelphia, and Maine. We have also signed direct training contracts with the cities of San Diego (CA) and Hartford (CT).

Emerge Career’s early results encouraged the Connecticut legislature to pass SB334 allocating funding to us to serve the Connecticut prison population. Through its Department of Labor, the state is providing funds for Emerge to educate hundreds of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated persons. Our work has most recently been covered by NBC.

To date, 87% of Emerge's students have successfully graduated, and 100% have obtained employment paying on average $78K / year.

We are backed by 776 (Alexis Ohanian), the Softbank Opportunity Fund, Y Combinator, Michael Seibel, Lenny Rachitsky, Pioneer Fund, among others.

• Recent media coverage: NBC, TechCrunch
• CT Bill: SB334, CBIA
• Here are some of our graduates: Florene, Trevon, Anthony

Who you are:

• Entrepreneurial mindset: Self-starter, and able to take ownership of ambiguous tasks. Every day we do things that have never been done before, and you will need to be comfortable with informed risk-taking.
• An owner personality: You're biased toward action, a great collaborator, and obsessed over details. You have strong organizational and project management skills and you never stop pushing toward clarity
• Grittiness: you never hesitate to roll up your sleeves and tackle something hands-on, you persevere when others might give up. You understand that startups are hard, but can be super fun with the right mindset
• Demonstrated experience in workforce development, recruiting, business development, marketing, or any combination of training and experience which demonstrates the ability to perform the duties as described
• Demonstrated experience working with diverse, at-risk youth, including but not limited to justice-involved youth, the unemployed, and underemployed

Where you will make an impact

• Entrepreneurial mindset: Self-starter, and able to take ownership of ambiguous tasks. Every day we do things that have never been done before, and you will need to be comfortable with informed risk-taking
• Build and maintain key relationships with students. Perform other duties as assigned
• Initiates and maintains ongoing personal contact with a variety of business and industry representatives as well as job placement/training agencies to promote programs for participant placement
• Regularly engages in employer site visits, contacting businesses to market Emerge
• Collaborate with the business community for appropriate job placement activities. Serves as an Ambassador of Emerge
• Implement employability skills training and job placement with performance excellence and contract compliance
• Accurately track, input data, and maintain comprehensive case files (physical and electronic) for participants
• Conduct frequent one-on-one participant and group session
• Prepares forms and reports related to placement activities
• Strong writing and communication skills

Start Date

ASAP

Benefits

• Salary Range: $60,000-$75,000
• Meaningful Equity
• Unlimited PTO policy

About the Founders

In 2020, Gabe and Zo co-founded Ameelio, an award-winning tech nonprofit that builds education and communication tools for prisons. While scaling Ameelio, they stumbled upon the issue of unemployment post-incarceration which Emerge Career seeks to address.

Zo holds a Masters degree in Criminology from the University of Cambridge, and JD-MBA from Yale Law and Yale School of Management. He is a 2022 MIT Tech Review 35 under 35 recipient.

Gabriel Saruhashi holds a Computer Science and Psychology degree from Yale. He has worked at Facebook and Zippi. He is a 2022 Forbes 30 Under 30 lister in the Social Impact category.

They were both recognized by Fast Company as two of the Most Creative People in Business in 2021.